Honor Road by Jason Ross (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

through the understory of brush like a cat pursued by a vacuum cleaner. He didn’t get time to shoot. Cameron side-stepped through the brush, trying to find a window to shoot the running man in the back.

“Who the hell was that?” an unfamiliar voice rasped.

“Shut up,” another whispered.

His gun leveled, Cameron hunted for a flash of cloth or wisp of hair. He sought a target—any target, now that the element of surprise had been blown.

The once-sleeping man wore camouflage like a soldier, and it forced Cameron to pick apart every shape in the undergrowth. New windows flashed open with every shift of his weight. Sticks, logs, sprigs of grass—the men would probably be lying down or crouching. They’d be buried in the thickest cover.

“Squeech!” a shrill voice squealed under Cameron’s feet. He stumbled back. The little girl, Leah, scrambled away from him, gagged and awash in terror. He’d stepped on her. His head jerked up in alarm. The raiders had certainly heard the squeal and they’d be looking his way.

“If you don’t surrender now, we’re coming in shooting,” Isaiah yelled again. “We’re from the Rockville militia and we’re going to shoot you without a trial unless you drop your guns and come into the clearing.”

It was a clever gambit, Cameron admitted, but it’d have the raiders looking in all directions. He wasn’t nearly as safe as he’d planned, and he hadn’t seen so much as a clump of hair dance in the breeze since his target flushed. The three marauders lay low in the duff, and low meant invisible.

The little girl scurried away on hands and knees. Cameron couldn’t afford to watch her go. Taking his eyes off the raiders’ whispered voices could prove fatal. Then the three went silent. Cameron strained for the slightest shush of grass or crackling of a twig. If they remained still, and if he moved through the brush, he wouldn’t see them until he was right on top of them. He was ten yards from the trampled-down bed, which meant they were likely very close. His best play was to wait for Isaiah to do whatever Isaiah would do, no matter how long that took. Cameron stopped, waited and feared.

The adrenaline had already hit him in the back of the head like a cricket bat when Isaiah yelled and the sleeper bolted. Now, the juice turned sour in his bloodstream. His legs wobbled and his breath came in strangled swallows. At best, the riflescope was milky and blurred around the edges. With a horse’s dose of stress galloping around in his head, all he saw in the scope was green blobs and watery patches. The optic became an utter liability—a pencil hole punched in wet newsprint. Without iron sights, he’d have to see the threat with the naked eye, find it in the shitty optic, then shoot. It’d take a long, long time.

The raiders whispered again. He placed them a little better. Twenty-five yards out, under the trunk of the thickest cottonwood.

“Gwaaah!” Isaiah bellowed and crashed through the branches. Motion flickered in the weeds. A man’s head—red, turbulent hair stuck out from under a black beanie cap. The horrible scope forced Cameron to lean against a tree trunk to steady himself. The red hair came into focus in the wet hole of the optic.

Boom! Cameron’s rifle barked.

Boom-boom-boom, boom, boom, boom-boom. Zzzzt. Boom.

Cameron’s legs folded like a rusted-out camp chair. He forced them, willed them, to do their job. He pushed up and rose against the gnarled bark of a cottonwood. His eyes flicked from knot to knot of shaded glen, mistaking sticks and logs for the gun barrel that would end his life.

A crouching man rose and aimed in the direction where Isaiah had rushed them. Cameron found him in the scope and pressed the trigger, but the trigger refused to budge. Had it rusted solid?

Cameron glanced down. The safety knob looked weird. He crouched to repair his rifle.

He ran the bolt and an empty, brass cartridge popped out, cartwheeled through the air and disappeared in the thick grass. He hadn’t reloaded after his shot at the redhead. He’d dropped to the ground instead. He had no idea if he’d hit him. He hadn’t even run his bolt. Something felt knocked askew in his brain, and he felt like a visitor in his own body.

His hands eased the bolt forward. He could feel the liquid resistance of another cartridge sliding into the breach then snicking home. He came up out of his crouch. The man with the black assault rifle crept toward Isaiah, more upright now. More confident.

Cameron centered the crosshairs on his chest and squeezed.

The rifle barked and the man vanished.

Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.

The bitterbrush around Cameron scythed apart with incoming rounds. He flopped face-down in the sawgrass. Bits of bark and chaff thickened the dust motes like a fairy war. Bullets came in waves, scores of them chopping through the thicket like invisible machetes. His face pressed into the understory. He smelled dark soil and sage. Gunpowder and sweat.

Some gauzy part of his mind knew that the pauses in the maelstrom were his enemy changing thirty-round magazines, but his legs refused to do anything useful with the information. The bullets zipped and hacked through wood and stem, little-by-little reducing the thicket to mulch.

Da-boom! Another shot echoed from the forest to the desert and back. The rifle fire from the marauders ceased. A man screamed, long and ceaseless, like an old fashioned train whistle. Another man moaned. Cameron pressed his face deeper down into the black soil.

“Cameron...are you alive?” Isaiah called from beyond the world of dank leaf litter and raw terror.

Cameron’s muscles were locked down like a ship in the storm, every joint seized in a curl of self-protection. At first, Cameron couldn’t even make his jaw function. When he finally forced it to unlock, his voice refused to obey. If he made a sound, the maelstrom might resume.

But he wasn’t shot. He knew that much for certain. There was no dull pulsing of hashed